How Do Aha Moments Lead to Feature and Product Adoption?
What is an Aha moment and why is it important?
The Aha moment is the moment when the user experiences the product or feature value for the first time.
It is a pivotal moment in the customer journey because it helps users understand how the product can help them achieve their goals.
How do Aha moments impact product adoption rates?
Without experiencing the Aha moment, the customer isn’t likely to activate the product or feature and adopt it to solve their problems.
This has a knock-on effect on other metrics like user retention, revenue, or advocacy. Users who don’t see the value of your product, don’t convert to paying accounts, renew their subscriptions, or recommend it to their colleagues.
How to find your product’s Aha moments?
Identifying the product’s Aha moment requires a bit of research and experimentation. Here’s how I would go about it.
1. Analyze user behavior at different user journey stages
Product analytics can help you understand what users do before they activate and adopt a feature or product.
To do so, first define the activation event and adoption event, and use them to conduct path analysis. In this way, you can map out and quantify all user actions leading to the event. The most frequent actions are likely to be linked to the Aha moment.
You can then visualize them in a line graph to see which of them correlate with activation/adoption events.
Simple? Here’s a twist:
The Aha moments are often unique for various user personas. They all use the product differently to achieve their goals. This means you have to analyze the behavior of different user segments separately.
2. Collect user feedback from different segments
Customer feedback can also help you figure out when users experience value.
How you go about it depends not only on the user persona but also on how successful the users are. So again, segmentation is the key to success.
Power users
Power users are the most successful customers and should be able to explain when they experienced the product value. And they are usually keen to help.
The best way to gather their insights?
Target them with an in-app survey. They are active product users, so it’s the easiest way to reach them. You can do it easily in Userpilot. Just define the criteria, like in the image below.
In the survey, ask a multiple-choice question like ‘At which point did you first witness the value of our tool?’ List the potential events or features you identified with product analytics as potential responses and add ‘other’. In case something slipped through your sieve.
Would an open-ended question be better?
Technically, it would give users a chance to elaborate on their responses and highlight other important aspects of the product experience.
However, such questions tend to have lower response rates. And not all users can reflect on their experience or verbalize their thoughts for the insights to be useful. But try.
Inactive users
Inactive or churned users are at the opposite end of the spectrum: they haven’t adopted the product because it didn’t meet their expectations for one reason or another.
The challenge is reaching them. An in-app survey won’t work, but you can try an email survey or contact them directly and invite them to an interview.
In the survey, ask them what product features were missing or they were disappointed with.
You can find both inactive users with Userpilot’s segmentation features.
For example, in the screenshot below, you can see that we’ve defined them as users on paid plans (Standard and Enterprise) who have completed an event inside the product but have been inactive for 30 days.
You can then target the segment with an email survey through a webhook or one of the CRMs we integrate with (Hubspot and Salesforce).
Develop multiple Aha moments
Based on the insights from user behavior analysis and customer feedback, make a list of all potential Aha moments.
Next, evaluate them to narrow the selection down to 2-3 options.
How?
Use these questions:
- Does it happen at the right time to be the Aha moment?
- Does it illustrate the feature or product value?
- Does it showcase how the product works?
- How easy is the event to complete for an average user?
- Does it lead to conversion?
Test your Aha moment in the user onboarding flow
After selecting the best candidates for the Aha moment, build onboarding experiences to guide users to them. Keep the number of steps to a minimum and use analytics to find the most direct route to each.
Next, run experiments to find the ones that drive most conversions.
You can do it by tracking the performance of each of the flows independently or conducting multivariate tests. The latter streamlines the experimentation process because you can compare the flows head-to-head.
How to optimize Aha moments for new users
Now that you know how to find the Aha moments, here are a few tips for optimizing them.
Understand your target audience
As mentioned, the Aha moment is likely to be different for every user persona, so defining them is key to success.
Use insights from market and customer research, feedback, analytics, and conversations with customers to find out about their:
- Role in the company.
- Sector and company size.
- Jobs to be done.
- Pain points and challenges.
- The stakeholders they collaborate with.
- Benefits of using your product for their use cases.
Introduce customers to Aha moments with an onboarding checklist
A checklist is a simple yet extremely effective onboarding tool.
It shows users exactly what they need to do to experience value and in what order. And they hinge on powerful psychological processes to drive action.
How?
Psychologists have proved that people find it difficult to move on before completing planned tasks. In the checklist, you make this kind of plan for them.
You can make the checklist even more compelling by adding a progress bar and including a task they’ve already completed. The latter uses the endowed progress effect to motivate users by making them feel like they’ve already achieved something before they even start.
Measure product usage and customer behavior
As you’ve already seen, product analytics are invaluable when it comes to finding Aha moments.
But their usefulness doesn’t stop there: You can use them to continuously refine your onboarding process and ensure they lead new and existing users to value.
For example, with Userpilot, you can track trends in feature usage and event completion to determine if the implemented changes move the needle in the right direction.
That’s just a start. Userpilot offers more advanced analytics tools like Funnels, Paths, and Retention analysis for more in-depth insights.
You can even create custom dashboards and track all relevant activation and adoption metrics and reports from one place.
To further refine your user onboarding flows and reduce the time to the Aha moment, its good practice to collect user feedback about their experience.
You can do it by triggering in-app surveys when they complete the flows or target users who struggle to complete it.
Combine the ideas from feedback and analytics insights to make informed changes and test them on small user samples before rolling them out to all users.
And continue doing it until the tweaks stop making any substantial impact.
Aha moment examples from famous brands
Let’s wrap up by analyzing the Aha moments for a handful of B2B and B2C products. To give you an idea of what it might look like and how they lead to product adoption.
Google is the dominant search engine at the moment. Despite the flak it’s been getting after recent algorithm updates and the AI overviews rollout, millions still use it every day to find relevant and accurate information. There’s a big chance that you used it to find this article.
What’s the Aha moment for Google?
It happens when a user performs their first successful search and finds an answer to a complex or obscure question.
This demonstrates Google’s core value: powerful search capabilities and instant access to vast amounts of information.
This realization encourages users to return for future searches, gradually making Google their go-to search engine.
Slack
Slack is a communication platform loved by business users around the world. It allows them to send direct and group messages, create channels and workspaces, have voice and video calls, and share files.
How do users experience Slack value?
Slack users interactive walkthroughs to bring new users up to speed and showcase the key features. As a result, they can start using it in no time.
However, to fully appreciate the impact of Slack collaboration, efficiency, and productivity, users need to send 2000 messages.
With over 3 billion active users, Facebook is the biggest social networking site. It enables users to reconnect with old friends, build new relationships, and create interest groups. It also offers a Marketplace functionality, a messenger, and a gaming platform, to name just a few.
With such a wide range of features, there are multiple Aha moments.
For the core Facebook functionality, it occurs when a new user adds 7 friends within their first 10 days on the platform.
This milestone helps users see the value of connecting with friends, sharing updates, and engaging with content that matters to them.
Zoom
Zoom is the video-conferencing platform of choice for millions of users. Its popularity skyrocketed during the Covid pandemic: in April 2020, nearly 300 million users participated in Zoom meetings daily.
What’s its secret?
Zoom boasts an intuitive UI which makes it easy to arrange and manage video calls. Users experience it by scheduling and launching their first call.
Airbnb
Airbnb is a marketplace where users can lease and rent short-term accommodations, like vacation rentals. With 7.7+ million active listings and 5+ million hosts worldwide, it’s the biggest platform of this kind.
For Airbnb, the Aha moment happens when a user books their first stay. That’s when they experience the convenience and the range of available offers.
Note that this doesn’t necessarily solidify the platform as a preferred accommodation provider. A lot depends on the experience users have during their stay.
Conclusion
By experiencing the Aha moment, users realize how valuable your product can be for their use case. This is essential for them to continue using the product and become loyal paying customers.
That’s why it’s in your interest to lead them to it as quickly as possible. You can do this with personalized onboarding flows that focus on the most relevant functionality.
If you’d like to learn more about Userpilot and how it can help you find the Aha moment and design onboarding flows that guide users to it, book the demo!
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